Essays in corporate finance and innovation

This Ph.D. dissertation consists of three independent chapters in corporate finance and innovation. The first chapter studies how in-group biases of patent examiners - an important set of regulators - affect their decisions to grant patents. Additionally, it highlights the costs of these biased decisions for inventors, startups, and the economy. The second chapter studies how limited investor attention affects analyst coverage of firms and thereby, information provision to the financial markets. The last chapter documents that firms punish female inventors for their “as-good-asrandom” creative failures more harshly than they punish men. These differences in punishment cause early-stage female inventors to exit innovation at higher rates than their male colleagues